by Nigel Cliff
The semesters went by, each seeming longer than it was because of the work packed in, the beginnings and endings marked by the increasingly raucous parties Jimmy Mathis threw at the fifteen-room apartment at West Seventy-Second Street and Riverside Drive that he shared with some other students. Van was always in the middle of the crush, playing the piano with a bevy of women singing along, chain-smoking now between pieces. It was hard not to like the gangly, goofy kid, even when he began to rack up prizes. In April 1952 it was the G. B. Dealey Memorial Award, named after a publisher of the Dallas Morning News, which earned him three hundred dollars, a performance with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and a solo recital. June of that year brought the Kosciuszko Foundation Chopin Award and a thousand dollars, a handy sum that paid off some of his mounting debts, as did a six-hundred-dollar Juilliard grant the following spring. Money was still short, and when he filled in the school’s Placement Bureau form, he offered himself for tuition at five dollars an hour and recitals at three hundred dollars “or less,” though he drew the line at playing hotels, nightclubs, or resorts. On the back page, Rosina added her endorsement:
Harvey Levan [sic] (“Van”) Cliburn possesses a most outstanding talent. He is a born virtuoso with dash and sweep which carry away the listener. In addition, he has the unusual combination of virtuosity with a rare, innate sensitivity for music . . .
Mr. Cliburn has excellent stage presence and, to my mind, if he continues to work as sincerely as he does now he will be one of the most promising young pianists of the day.
Suddenly it was the end of the year. Late as usual, Van rushed back to the Spicers’ with one classmate to help him pack and another to stand outside holding a cab that would take him to the airport. He threw his things helter-skelter into a suitcase and jumped on it until it closed. Then he ran out with the bulging bag in one hand, a briefcase stuffed with music in the other, and his spare pair of shoes sticking out of his coat pockets.
ROSINA’S CLASS was convinced it ran Juilliard, or at least the piano department, but within it, sudden fierce rivalries bubbled up and soured the air. In Van’s second year, an ambitious seventeen-year-old with a crew cut named Daniel Pollack joined as a full scholarship student: “Excellent talent,” Rosina had noted at his entrance examination. Pollack was six months younger than Van, was nearly as tall at six foot two, and the year before arriving had won an appearance with his hometown orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic. He was bent on proving himself, and since both his parents had been born in Russia, he had a stronger claim on its heritage than Van. With their different characters, it was apparent to the class that the two did not warm to each other.
The new school year also brought the annual competition to perform as soloist with the Juilliard Symphony Orchestra. To Van and Rosina’s glee, the prize piece was announced as Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, and they worked on it together for several weeks. Rosina was an unassailable authority where the Tchaikovsky was concerned. If a student dared argue when she told him to pedal during a passage that was marked “staccato” and was always played staccato, she would sweetly say, “But Tchaikovsky told Mr. Lhévinne to pedal there.” After the class heats, Jeaneane Dowis, who had been banned from competing after winning two years in a row, ventured an opinion that Van’s playing bordered on cheap thrills, which made Rosina so angry that she refused to speak to her for five days. Van went forward to the semifinals. “Well, we don’t really need to have any finals,” a jury member said at the end. “Van won the competition.”
That January, he played the concerto in the Juilliard Concert Hall. The gangly Texan sat tall in the saddle. His fidgety geniality stilled into steady resolve. His huge hands hovered like hawks’ wings and dropped fearlessly, flying with abandon. His interpretation was built on a grand scale and burnished to a lustrous glow. There was an eighteen-year-old’s overexuberance about his tempo changes and dynamics, and he missed a few notes, but Rosina, listening in the audience, was transported. It was Anton Rubinstein’s bravura and beauty she was hearing: the dramatic Russian spirit, virile and volcanic, a little brash and crazy, tempered by Liszt’s long, lyrically elegant line, with a dash of American steadiness that stayed the thrillingly supple phrasing.
At the end of his second year, she graded him “Excellent.” She had always admired him, and now she had come to love him, for his plucky joie de vivre, his childlike wonder, and his desperate naïveté. Still, there were many in the Juilliard hothouse who were convinced Van would never reach the top. The boy was a lovable mess—one day, he fell asleep and nearly missed his own showcase—but more to the point, he was a lovable Texan mess.
With Europe rebuilding after the war and the Iron Curtain impassable, unprecedented opportunities were opening up for American musicians. Yet almost to a man—women in the field were still a rarity—the rising stars were New York Jews of Russian and Eastern European heritage. There was no mystery to this. Back in Imperial Russia most Jews had been restricted to a region known as the Pale of Settlement, where they were heavily taxed, banned from sensitive jobs, forced to enroll their sons in military service, and devastated by pogroms. Under these hardships, many had emigrated and some had converted to Russian Orthodoxy, including the grandfather of Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein. When the Rubinstein brothers founded the St. Petersburg and Moscow conservatories, they established diplomas that permitted Jews to live beyond the Pale, and music became an escape route for poor Russian and Eastern European Jews much as athletics would be for African Americans. Their descendants were the inheritors of that tradition, the people whom audiences expected and trusted to interpret European music. It was true that the foremost American pianist of the early twentieth century was born Lucy Hickenlooper in San Antonio, Texas. But she changed her name to Olga Samaroff, and when she married the conductor Leopold Stokowski, she bolted his name on for double protection. The idea of a blond Southern Baptist called Van becoming a star virtuoso was downright peculiar. He was too domestic.
IF VAN hid his hunger for success from his peers, to the Spicers he appeared tremendously, determinedly ambitious. When he was home at night they had to prise him away from the Chickering before the neighbors complained. If they had friends round, he insisted on playing for them. For a time he practiced while sitting on the floor, to strengthen his wrists. One day he came in wringing his hands after a long session: “I never want to see a piano again,” he cried, but fifteen minutes later he was hard at work, caught up in the music, singing and humming as he played, stopping to murmur, “Isn’t that beautiful?”
The Spicers’ only child, a daughter, had died five years before, and Van became like a son to them. They worried that he had few interests outside music. The Spicers were hot Yankee fans, but he loathed sports. His room gave no clues to a special girl: there were only three pictures in it, of Mother, Daddy, and Rosina Lhévinne. He was obsessed with Barbara Stanwyck movies; otherwise, his main nonmusical interest seemed to be people, whose company he unaffectedly adored. Allen Spicer, an Old Princetonian, was especially perturbed that Van never opened a book or newspaper. The boy paid little attention when the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb on an atoll in the Pacific Ocean, or when Dwight D. Eisenhower won the1952 presidential election by a landslide, in part by attacking the Truman administration for not doing enough to combat the creeping Communist threat.
“Van,” said Allen, “if you don’t read the headlines, you won’t even know if there’s a war on.”
Van grinned. He lived in a world of eternal verities, where time was an illusion. If, in the spring of 1953, he heard about the convulsions shaking the tormented empire his beloved Russia had become, he could scarcely have imagined that they would soon give him the chance to silence his musical skeptics.
• 3 •
The Successor
AT DUSK on March 1, 1953, Dacha no. 1 was eerily quiet. Not a curtain had twitched since the early hours when the four dinner guests staggered out after the usual boozy bacchanalia, c
ollapsed in the backs of their limousines, and sped back to Moscow. For the first time anyone could remember, the master of the house told the guards to turn in for the night, and they slept soundly until ten. Normally he woke between then and midday, but the morning had gone and then the afternoon, and now they were beginning to get scared, scared at what might have happened and even more scared that they might have to disobey his orders not to disturb him.
At around 6:00 p.m., a light came on in the small dining room. The guards breathed a little and waited, at full alert, but 10:00 p.m. came, and still there was no call.
“Go on, you go, it’s your responsibility,” junior guard Pavel Lozgachev said to the head guard, Starostin.
“I’m afraid,” he murmured.
“Fine, be afraid, but I’m not about to play the hero,” Lozgachev retorted. Just then a package arrived from the Central Committee, and delivering the mail was Lozgachev’s duty.
“All right, then,” he said. “Wish me luck, boys.”
The thickset sentry stomped down the long corridor that joined the lodge to the main house. They always made a noise to warn the Boss they were coming, while pulling themselves into the attitude he liked: erect, not too soldierly.
The door to the small dining room was open, revealing wood-paneled walls newly covered with blown-up magazine photos of young children: a boy on skis, toddlers picnicking under a cherry tree. Lozgachev stepped in, and suddenly his legs abandoned him. The Boss was lying on the carpet in his vest and pajama bottoms, an acrid stain spreading round him. He grunted and weakly raised his hand.
Somehow the guard moved across the room. “Comrade Stalin, what’s wrong?” he asked. “Should I call a doctor?”
This was a dangerous proposition. Since November, Stalin had arrested hundreds of medics, including his personal physician, on suspicion of plotting to murder him and other top leaders. Many were Jewish; Stalin had convinced himself that Jews, with their links to America, were incurable enemies of the state. “Beat them until they confess!” he ordered his torturers. “Beat, beat and beat again. Put them in chains, grind them into powder!” The propagandists announced the results: “It has been established that all these killer-doctors, monsters in human form . . . were hired agents of foreign intelligence services.” With Pravda declaring that America and Britain were “feverishly preparing for a new world war,” public trials of the medical fifth column were due to open in four days’ time.
“Dz . . . Dz . . . ,” Stalin mumbled incoherently. Next to him were a copy of Pravda and his pocket watch, which had stopped at half past six. His eyelids closed, and he gently snored. Lozgachev shakily picked up the intercom phone. “Come to the house quick,” he said, sweat beading on his forehead. Starostin arrived in seconds, followed by two other guards. They stopped short.
“Let’s put him on the sofa,” Lozgachev said. They heaved the stout body onto the pink upholstered divan, and Starostin went off to phone Ignatiev, the head of the secret police. Ignatiev panicked and told him to phone Lavrenty Beria, the powerful security supremo.
The other guards moved Stalin from the pink divan to the sofa in the large dining room, where the air was fresher. He shivered, and they rolled down his sleeves and covered him with a blanket.
Beria was unavailable, but Starostin reached Georgy Malenkov, Stalin’s latest favorite and heir apparent. Malenkov tried to phone Beria as well but called back after half an hour to say he couldn’t find him. Another half hour went by, and Beria himself called. “Don’t say anything to anyone about Comrade Stalin’s illness,” he instructed them.
Meanwhile, Malenkov got hold of Nikolai Bulganin, the suave deputy premier, and Nikita Khrushchev, the voluble, roly-poly party head in Moscow. These three and Beria had been Stalin’s dinner companions the previous night. For years the dictator had presided over his empire from his table, plying his increasingly bloated cronies with strong liquor and relishing their loss of control almost as much as he enjoyed hearing them inform on one another to gain favor. After the meal, the mustachioed host would play the gramophone and watch the others cut a rug; one night he made Khrushchev squat down and perform a spinning, kicking Cossack dance called the gopak, which even the performer likened to a cow hoofing on ice. “When Stalin says dance, a wise man dances,” Khrushchev ruefully remarked, summing up the operation of the entire Soviet government. When the torment ended, at around 5:00 a.m., they would totter out, relieved to have survived: “One never knows if one’s going home or to prison,” Bulganin once confided to Khrushchev. One by one, their comrades had disappeared, until the four were the last men standing.
“Look, the security boys have phoned from Stalin’s place,” Malenkov told Khrushchev. “They are very worried, something’s happened to Stalin. We’ve got to go there.” Khrushchev should go ahead, he added, and he and the others would follow. Khrushchev was surprised: when he had left, Stalin had been pretty drunk, but in fine fettle, jabbing his rotund protégé in the belly and warbling “Mikita,” in a takeoff of Khrushchev’s Ukrainian accent.
At 3:00 a.m. a car approached through the birches, golden pines, and camouflaged antiaircraft guns and drove up to the gates in the double perimeter fence. Malenkov and Beria got out. They made an odd pair: Malenkov, the finicky former keeper of the party records, resembling a portly baker, with his bloated torso and slicked hair; Beria, the brilliant KGB butcher and notorious pervert, equally rotund but the very picture of a shifty cartoon detective, with his turned-up collar and black trilby jammed on his head, over a pince-nez with thick lenses that made his eyes pop out.
“What’s up with the Boss?” Malenkov asked one of the guards. His boots squeaked, and as he went inside he took them off and tucked them under his arm.
Lozgachev was still with Stalin, who was snoring.
“What are you panicking for?” Beria asked, swearing at him. “The Boss is sound asleep. Let’s go, Malenkov!” The guard explained what had happened, but Beria told him not to bother them or disturb Comrade Stalin. The two men left.
Alone with Stalin, Lozgachev began to imagine the dire consequences if the vozhd died on his watch. He woke up the chief guard and persuaded him to call the inner circle again.
Sometime after 7:00 a.m., Khrushchev finally showed up.
“How’s the Boss?” he asked.
“He’s very poorly,” Lozgachev replied. “There’s something wrong.”
“The doctors are on their way,” Khrushchev reassured him.
The room filled up as the party bosses arrived, several openly weeping. Stalin’s eyes briefly opened, gleaming with their usual tiger intensity, and seemed to flicker with recognition. “Comrade Stalin,” his old comrade Kliment Voroshilov spoke up, “we, all your true friends and colleagues, are here. How are you feeling, dear friend?” But the moment of lucidity had gone.
By half past nine the doctors finally arrived. None of them had treated Stalin before, and their hands shook as they examined him. A dentist dropped the dictator’s false teeth. The others fumbled at his shirt, and Lozgachev tore it off. To the guard’s intense relief, the doctors diagnosed a cerebral hemorrhage: a massive stroke.
Ignatiev, the executor of the doctors’ plot, who had been head of the secret police for less than two years, hovered outside, too scared to enter. “Come in, don’t be shy,” Lozgachev said, waving him in. When Stalin had let fly at him a few months earlier, Ignatiev had a heart attack.
Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana, arrived direct from her French class and was met by Khrushchev and Bulganin, who hugged her, weeping. Later her brother Vasily showed up, drunk as usual. After the previous year’s May Day parade, when Vasily authorized a flyby in bad weather conditions and crashed two Tu-4 bombers, Stalin fired him as Moscow Air Force commander. Not knowing the reason for the summons, Vasily had brought his maps, in case he had to account for himself. After a minute, he lurched off to the guards’ lodge and screamed that his father had been murdered, then weaved out to his car and went home.
More doctors arrived and consulted. They applied leeches behind Stalin’s ears and a cold compress to his head, injected him with camphor, administered magnesium sulfate enemas, took a urine sample, and left instructions to feed him sweet tea or soup from a spoon. Later, a coffin-like iron lung was wheeled in, accompanied by wide-eyed young specialists. Occasionally Stalin let out a groan.
Bulganin stayed with the patient while the other three leaders drove to the Kremlin for a conference in the Boss’s office. Present in the room were the ten members of the old Politburo, which Stalin had replaced the previous year with a much larger Presidium. Beria, Malenkov, and Khrushchev were there, together with old Voroshilov and Khrushchev’s mentor “Iron Lazar” Kaganovich, a former shoemaker turned manager of heavy industry and mass terror. Also in attendance were former foreign minister Vyacheslav Molotov, a cold-blooded hard-liner whom Lenin had nicknamed “Iron Butt,” and former foreign trade minister Anastas Mikoyan, an emphatic Armenian with dark, glittering eyes and flashing, clenched teeth. Both were Kremlin stalwarts whom Stalin had recently fired and publicly denounced. Within hours of his stroke, the old order had restored itself to power.